Real Clear Artshttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts
Judith H. Dobrzynski on CultureMon, 24 Oct 2016 15:45:43 +0000en-UShourly1Picture This! Scenes From Tefaf-New Yorkhttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/24/picture-this-scenes-from-tefaf-new-york/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/24/picture-this-scenes-from-tefaf-new-york/#commentsMon, 24 Oct 2016 14:36:13 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3948More ›]]>I spent most of Friday afternoon and evening at Tefaf-New York, and I found it to be as full of interesting paintings and objects as I expected. Here are pictures of some interesting booths–there were so many. When I remember where I was, I’ve added a few details.

Richard L. Feigen’s booth–with a wonderful Courbet bust in the center and a fantastic Velazquez on the right.

Shapero Rare Books.

Wonderful glass on that wall, at Lillian Nassau gallery.

Otto Naumann’s booth: the Mengs, top left, which was in the Met’s Unfinished exhibition, sold on Friday to Anderson Cooper.

Please don’t draw any conclusions from the scarce sight of people in these photos. I waited for quiet moments, so you could see what was in the booths.

Tefaf continues through Wednesday.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/24/picture-this-scenes-from-tefaf-new-york/feed/0The Big Stakes For Art This Weekhttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/20/the-big-stakes-for-art-this-week/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/20/the-big-stakes-for-art-this-week/#commentsThu, 20 Oct 2016 14:29:13 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3946More ›]]>Tempus fugit! I’ve been meaning to write more about The European Fine Art Fair’s arrival in New York later this week, but have not had the time. But you can bet that I will be there, prowling the booths at the Park Avenue Armory on Friday. There will be a lot of wonderful art on view.

Before that, on Thursday night, a group of dealers on the Upper East Side of New York are opening their doors to an evening art walk–15 (at least, one or two more have joined since the original announcement) galleries will be open from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Some are showing at Tefaf; others are not, but will be open for extended hours, such as on Sunday, during Tefaf’s run. Here’s the rundown on that.

This week is important to anyone who cares about what these days is called historical art. Contemporary art is getting all the public attention, either because of its high costs or because it shocks or awes. Historical art has to compete for attention as much as anything else, and this is one opportunity.

In the past, dealers did not have to worry too much about public perceptions; collectors were their audience. But I think that has changed, because some collectors nowadays pay attention to what certain segments of the population talk about–even if these individuals don’t collect art.

So, as Frances Beatty, president of the New York dealer Richard L. Feigen & Company, told me when I interviewed her for my article on Tefaf New York for The New York Times, “We have to make this a destination. We have to make this really fun.” Hence, the opening parties.

Of course, many galleries always given opening receptions. What has changed is the degree to which they must open their arms, must entertain, now. And they have to be in the game for the long haul.

But here’s one thing in their favor, according to Suzanne Gyorgy, the head of the Art Advisory & Finance at Citi Private Bank. who predicts more buying at galleries (including fairs) and less at auctions in the coming years. “These clients are super-busy, this group is super-engaged year-round,” she said. “The control of the negotiation is important to them. You’re talking to the gallery directly and it’s a direct transaction. People are reacting to the opacity of auctions, with the financial arrangements.”

This week will be only a preliminary test–if Tefaf New York and the New York dealers do well this year, it will partly be because their efforts are new. They have to prove that they do well next year, and the next.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/20/the-big-stakes-for-art-this-week/feed/0Maastricht, AKA Tefaf, Comes to New Yorkhttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/03/maastricht-aka-tefaf-comes-to-new-york/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/03/maastricht-aka-tefaf-comes-to-new-york/#commentsMon, 03 Oct 2016 13:30:25 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3941More ›]]>Given all the hubbub last week about layoffs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, more important to me, the deadlines I faced for other articles, I did not have time to expand on my article in last Tuesday’s New York Times about The European Fine Art Fair’s move into North America.

Tefaf–most often discussed by its location as in “are you going to Maastricht this year?”–is to my mind the most interesting and best art fair in the world. The participating dealers, usually numbering about 270, presents art from antiquity to the present. It’s huge. The vernissage, which takes place on a Thursday, before the public is admitted, is an incredible experience because of what visitors can see in the booths and who else they can see exploring the art, too. If you go, you will run into museum directors, trustees, curators and collectors–everyone extremely interested in art. It’s fun.

And as you’ve no doubt read, it’s too big to come to the Park Avenue Armory, which–aside from Central Park, a non-starter in the de Blasio administration and perhaps others–is the most desirable venue for a premier fair like Tefaf. Consider the wealth that lives in the surrounding zip codes and it’s easy to see why.

So, the first slice–with art from antiquity through the 1920s–will open in a vernissage and benefit on Oct. 21 at the Armory and to the public on Oct. 22.

You can read my article Can Maastricht Take Manhattan? here. But I spoke to many more people and gathered much more information and opinions about the gambit than what made it into print. So let me share a few things with you that didn’t make print (or online).

“We want to establish Tefaf’s brand all over the world,” Patrick van Maris, Tefaf’s chief executive, told me. The most interesting statistic to me in the article was that just 2,000 to 2,500 of Maastricht’s annual visitors are from the U.S., and we buy more art than anyone else in the world. To come here. Tefaf is collaborating with Artvest Partners and, interestingly, its co-founders, despite a combined total of 35 years in the art world, were Tefaf neophytes. Michael Plummer visited for the first time in 2016; Jeff Rabin, in 2016–after Artvest signed the deal with Tefaf. “We knew that a lot of New Yorkers had never been either,” said Mr. Plummer. “It’s a big commitment of time.”

He’s right: I surveyed several veteran art collectors and few had traveled to Maastricht. If Tefaf can lure them to the Armory–the marketing effort so far seems very sluggish to me–I think they will be pleased by the art for sale there, all of which is strictly vetted. Yet those collectors, surveyed before and after my article ran in the NYT, knew little about the fair’s dates and other particulars. One, who said she has mostly stopped buying, asked me if Tefaf would offer programs and lectures–because she would go to those. Likewise, a museum director I spoke with knew little about the New York venture and had not yet received anything from Tefaf.

The Armory is giving over virtually all of its available space to Tefaf–especially the recently restored period rooms on the second floor. But how is Tefaf going to get people to go upstairs? Visitors are used to taking in the Drill Hall, but not the upstairs. Well, it has two good, I think, plans. First, a group of leading dealers volunteered to go up there–the galleries there are bigger than the booths downstairs and they will bring very fine works of art and jewelry in a “curated” group show called “The Master Collective.”

There will also be an exhibit on that floor of art by Hercules Segers from the Rijksmuseum; it will preview an exhibition, opening Oct. 7 in Amsterdam, that will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art next year.

About 20 dealers are new to New York–or are returning after a long hiatus. They include Rob Smeets Old Master Paintings, of Geneva, Switzerland; Kunstkammer Georg Laue, from Munich; A. Aardewerk Antiquair Juwelier, a silver dealer from the Hague; Jaime Eguiguren—Arte y Antiquedadas, from Buenos Aires; and Christophe de Quenetain, a French furniture dealer from Paris. Paul Smeets told me that he is bringing six “totally fresh” paintings.

Tefaf and Artvest are hoping that the quality of the art in the fair will surprise and please American collectors–and they may be right. Not only did the Artvest partners say things like “With the European dealers, we’re getting access to a depth of quality that hasn’t been here,” but others did too. Francois de Poortere, the head of the Old Masters Department at Christie’s–New York, told me, “It has been a long time coming. We’ve been longing to have a proper Old Master fair in New York, and they have the best dealers in the field. They know they have to bring fresh property. They will do well if they do.” And Anthony Crichton-Stuart, who runs a reincarnated version of the venerable London dealer Agnews, noted, rightly: “There have been Old Master fairs here in the past. They weren’t as productive as they might have been, which is why they ceased to exist.” He is bringing something special to Tefaf-New York, but when we spoke a few weeks ago, he declined to tell me exactly what–except to say that is it big.

Rachel Kaminsky, a private dealer and a booster of Tefaf, summed it up: “This fair will be good enough to attract people from across the country if they do it right.”

We shall see if they do.

I’ll have more on Tefaf-New York in the coming days. In the meantime, I’ll post some pictures of some items that will be for sale at the fair.

Photo Credits: from top to bottom: Madonna and Child by Lorenzo Marcandante de Breta at Colnaghi; a German court games set, c. 1700, at Kunstkammer Georg Laue; a Caillebotte at Dickinson Gallery; a Cycladic head at Charles Ede Ltd.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/10/03/maastricht-aka-tefaf-comes-to-new-york/feed/0What Makes A Good Collector? What Is Craft Vs. Art? Two Storieshttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/09/22/what-makes-a-good-collector-what-is-craft-vs-art-two-stories/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/09/22/what-makes-a-good-collector-what-is-craft-vs-art-two-stories/#commentsThu, 22 Sep 2016 18:50:47 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3937More ›]]>Usually, the most noteworthy collectors–aside from those, like J. Paul Getty, with the wherewithal to buy anything they want–are the ones that go their own way, that collect a field that’s out-of-fashion but full of worthy artworks. Usually, they both self-educate and they seek expert advice.

One such person is Walter O. Evans (at right), a retired surgeon who began purchasing works by African-American artists back in the late 1970s. He now owns one of the best such collections in the United States. Perhaps you have heard about him–part of his collection was on tour. The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art,” customized for each venue and managed by Evans’s wife, Linda, visited about 50 museums between 1991 and 2012.

Evans also donated about 60 works to the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005, though his trove still numbers in the hundreds. As I wrote:

I saw a number of them myself earlier this year, when I visited his townhouse in Savannah’s historic district on assignment for Traditional Home magazine, which published my article in its October issue. More than one person I spoke with called the collection “museum-quality.” One of his works by Jacob Lawrence is at left.

In the same issue of Traditional Home, I write about a quilt artist named Victoria Findlay Wolfe. She helped start the modern quilt movement, and is also has a very interesting story. She started as a painter and she draws inspiration from artists including Matisse.

Furthermore, for those of you who prefer to think about quilts as craft rather than art, she has another art connection. That “Findlay” in her name refers to her husband Michael, Findlay, a director at Acquavella Galleries and author of The Value of Art.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/09/22/what-makes-a-good-collector-what-is-craft-vs-art-two-stories/feed/0U.S. As Boiling Pot: “America After the Fall”http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/25/u-s-as-boiling-america-after-the-fall/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/25/u-s-as-boiling-america-after-the-fall/#commentsThu, 25 Aug 2016 13:25:48 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3932More ›]]>Think about American art in the 1930s. Does anything come to mind? Maybe the Regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. But there was so much more to the decade than that. For one thing, art was “subsidized” via the Works Progress Administration in the second half of the decade, probably creating a bigger volume and more artists than usual. These years were a hotpot of creativity in many modes, like social realism, surrealism and other modernist styles.

Yet this is an understudied and underexposed period. America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Art Institute of Chicago does some way toward redressing this, as I learned when I visited the exhibition earlier this month. I reviewed it, positively, in today’s Wall Street Journal, where my piece is headlined Bullish on Creativity. I’m sorry I didn’t get to Chicago sooner, because the exhibit runs only until Sept. 18. Then–another good sign for American art appreciation–it moves to L’Orangerie in Paris and then to the Royal Academy in London. It will be the first time, curator Judith Barter tells me, that Wood’s American Gothic leaves these shores.

I won’t summ up the exhibition for you; let me just set the stage and quote from the catalogue. Even as citizens’ faith in America was shaken, American artists strove to develop a national art.

The result was artistic sparring throughout the 1930s between those who wanted an American art based on realism and those who felt that abstraction was a universal language that pushed beyond nationalism. Many artists sought a new realist aesthetic language aimed at the people; others tried to express the inner world of dreams and imagination. Some used their work for social protest and to address politics; still others tried to create new forms of art and politics that could repair a democracy damaged by economic chaos.

It must have been hard, then, for Barter to choose just 50 works of art. This show could have sprawled in an attempt to show everything. But I am so glad she did have the discipline to pick only what she thought was best. Not everything is to my taste, but the quality is very high–even though some works were pulled from museums’ storerooms.

If you click on the WSJ link, you can see Aaron Douglas’s Aspiration. So let me post two works that are not well known, but which I liked a lot. Up top is Joe Jones’s Roustabouts, from 1934, and below is Helen Lundeberg’s Double Portrait of the Artist in Time, from 1935.

I can think of only one flaw, but I can’t attribute it to the curator, as I didn’t ask: There is music playing in the galleries. Woody Guthrie, for example. I like music; I like Guthrie. But I found it to be distracting and tried to blot it out. Let’s not have this mini-trend spread.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/25/u-s-as-boiling-america-after-the-fall/feed/0A Master, A Mysterious Girl and An Unsolved Questionhttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/18/a-master-a-mysterious-girl-and-an-unsolved-question/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/18/a-master-a-mysterious-girl-and-an-unsolved-question/#commentsThu, 18 Aug 2016 14:28:12 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3928More ›]]>When I traveled to Berlin earlier this summer, I spent about four and half hours at the Gemaldegalerie (not enough time)–a full hour of which was spent looking at Portrait of a Young Girl (1470) by Petrus Christus. It’s the subject of the “Masterpiece” column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, and was published on Saturday under the headline The Girl with the Sidelong Glance (at right). (If you are not a WSJ subscriber, you can read it here.)

It is a great picture, clearly, but I wouldn’t have noticed all the details without the help of Stephan Kemperdick, the museum’s curator of Early Netherlandish and German Painting. He spent most of that hour with me, and two things in particular come to mind that I might have missed without him: the very thin “tissue” draped around her shoulders (easy to see around her neck, but not across her bodice) and her unmatched eyelids. He also pointed out the geometry of the painting, the molding that aligns with her mouth and the vertical axis, neither of which I mentioned. (I read catalogue and book excerpts about her, too.)

As if to demonstrate the portrait’s drawing power, while we were talking, comparing it with three nearby van Eycks, a man came into the gallery with a folding stool. Taking no note of us, he plopped his stool right in front of the painting and sat there staring at it for at least five minutes. And then he got up and left, cursorily looking at other works.

Some people are bothered by that heavy strap around her neck holding the headdress in place. Christus used it as a pictorial device, as my article notes, but Kemperdick did not know of another like it in paintings for a female, though he did tell me that a picture of Philip the Good shows something similar. I found that manuscript page, painted by Rogier van der Weyden, which is the frontispiece to the Chroniques de Hainaut held in Royal Library of Belgium–it’s at left (for a larger image, click on it and click again on the next page).

Still, the girl is mysterious and neither Kemperdick nor any of the written materials I consulted knew anything about the loop in the bonnet. Imagine my surprise–and delight–when a read wrote to me this morning saying that long ago she had been told by “an expert” that the velvet forehead loop advertised that she had a dowry of some known quantify–perhaps “10..thousand? hundred? pounds? gold coins?”annually.

Can we solve that mystery? Does anyone reading this know about the loop?

UPDATE: Maryan Ainsworth, the Met curator who organized a show of Petrus Christus in the ’90s. writes:

I never heard the theory about a dowry being associated with the loop on the lady’s black hat and very much doubt that is the case. Although I don’t recall the source, my understanding is that the loop was made of a stiff material and its purpose was to anchor the hat and prevent it from teetering backwards because of its weight.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/18/a-master-a-mysterious-girl-and-an-unsolved-question/feed/0An Exhibition Not to Be Missed, And One I’m Glad Is Overhttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/11/an-exhibition-not-to-be-missed-and-one-im-glad-is-over/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/11/an-exhibition-not-to-be-missed-and-one-im-glad-is-over/#commentsThu, 11 Aug 2016 15:16:59 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3923More ›]]>In New York, I visited several special exhibitions last week. Let me mention two here.

It’s hard to get attention for small shows in New York, and this one did not receive the reviews or media coverage it deserved. It’s built around a figure of King Ur-Nama, ca. 2112–2094 B.C., that was purchased by Morgan (detail at left, but if you go to the link above, you can see not just the whole figure but a rotating picture of him) and borrows some works of the period from the Metropolitan Museum and other lenders, including a couple private collectors who are unlikely to lend these pieces again anytime soon.

Just ten little works, including a couple of cylinder seals, can make a big impression. I’m posting two pictures of two of the other figures.

The first, at right, dates to 3300 to 3100 B.C. and is thought to be a male priest. It’s one of the oldest surviving cast-copper sculptures from Mesopotamia. Just look at the muscular chest, the asymetrical posture and, if you can see it, the foot tucked under his body.

Below him is a man balancing a box on his head, dated c. 2900 – 2600 B.C. He is traveling down a ramp, perhaps, and you can just see him trying to maintain his balance and his erect posture.

The exhibit I’m glad is gone is Martin Creed: The Back Door at the Park Avenue Armory. I had seen one of his balloon works, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, some years back, and I know he won the Turner Prize. I wanted to see more for myself, especially since this show won loads of publicity. ARTNews wrote of it, “against all odds, his deadpan Duchampian strategies spill over into profundity.” The magazine called him triumphant.

…viewers will encounter films of people vomiting and of people defecating, along with a piano that opens and slams shut, an array of metronomes ticking at different speeds, and a room whose lights go on and off at one-second intervals. All are outpourings from Mr. Creed’s psyche, a delicate but highly tuned instrument beset by odd compulsions and Freudian obsessions.

The Armory gave him its entire first floor, including the historic rooms.

But what a disappointment. I didn’t find any of the many parts moving, or exhilarating, or even entertaining. I found it to be provocative without originality (a video of a penis and another of a female breast?) and, far from “compelling,” to quote Nicholas Serota, I found it tedious.

In the NYT article, Creed said: “I feel bad to say I’m an artist, because I don’t really know what art is…I would say I’m a person who tries to do things and work in a field that is commonly known as art. I try and do things because I find life is difficult and I want to make it better. More bearable.”

I agree with the first half of that quote, but I find the second half hard to believe.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/11/an-exhibition-not-to-be-missed-and-one-im-glad-is-over/feed/0A Big Splash for A Little Museumhttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/03/a-big-splash-for-a-little-museum/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/03/a-big-splash-for-a-little-museum/#commentsThu, 04 Aug 2016 00:03:23 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3918More ›]]>Winona, MN, is home to just 27,500 people, but it has an art museum worthy of a much bigger city. The Minnesota Marine Art Museum (below)–which is far more interesting that you may now be imagining–just celebrated its tenth anniversary. And an article that I wrote about it for The Wall Street Journal was published today.

The MMAM was the brainchild of a local collecting couple named Bob Kierlin and Mary Burritcher. They knew nothing about art when they started collecting, as I wrote:

Confronting a large blank wall in their living room, they mentioned their quandary to a neighbor, who soon handed them a stack of old art magazines. In a three-year-old ad, Mr. Kierlin found a marine painting he liked. He called the dealer and the painting was theirs, sight unseen. They bought other works like that, not looking in person and not even knowing that art prices can be negotiated.

But today they, with the help of others, have created something very worthy. For them, marine art includes any work with enough water to “float a boat.” And so the museum–which has beautiful, spacious galleries, is filled with works by many great artists. It has been expanded twice and most of it is filled with works on loan from the couple. They include Turner’s 1841 watercolor Heidelberg With a Rainbow, Gauguin’s Still Life with Onions, Heade’s The Great Florida Sunset and View From Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica, Beckmann’s “Dutch Landscape with Bathers” plus paintings by Monet, van Gogh, Picasso, O’Keeffe, Hartley, Cole, Bierstadt and Homer. Plus many more.

The couple and the museum officials also did something else smart: They hired Annette Blaugrund, a former director of the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts, to edit a catalogue, Charting New Waters: Redefining Marine Painting. She was aided by dealer/art historian John Driscoll, who has been advising Kierlin and Burritcher, and she enlisted highly credentialed art historians to write the entries. They include Joseph Ketner, Barbara Novak and Leo Mazow.

By nature, traditional marine art (barring shipwrecks) tends to be romantic, and the MMAM leans toward unroiled waters, too. It’s not edgy. But it’s wonderful that it exposes so many people to art that might not otherwise get the chance–even in Minnesota.

Go visit!

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/03/a-big-splash-for-a-little-museum/feed/0Good News From a Buyout, For A Changehttp://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/03/good-news-from-a-buyout-for-a-change/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/03/good-news-from-a-buyout-for-a-change/#commentsWed, 03 Aug 2016 11:35:16 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3915More ›]]>I’ve been holding my tongue for a few days, but now I can give you the news of Richard Aste, the European paintings curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Aste took the museum’s buyout offer–it’s shrinking, as is the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

Yesterday came the official word that Aste will become director of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.

Interestingly, the first quote in the McNay press release comes from the Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, which–I suppose–shows that he didn’t leave for negative reasons:

Over the past six years, Rich rose to be one of the most treasured curators at the Brooklyn Museum. With a focus on Latin American art, he brought insightful exhibitions to vast publics while expanding the Museum’s reach and scope to increasingly diverse audiences.

From Sarah Harte, president of the board of trustees at the McNay, came this:

Rich exemplifies everything we were looking for in our next director: a collaborative leadership style, intellectual curiosity, and a deep knowledge of the arts. With his broad international perspective and culturally varied background, he is poised to build, strengthen, and diversify relationships between the McNay and the community of San Antonio.We are confident he will take the McNay to the next level.

]]>http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/03/good-news-from-a-buyout-for-a-change/feed/0Diane Arbus, The Met and “The Envelope”http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/02/diane-arbus-the-met-and-the-envelope/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2016/08/02/diane-arbus-the-met-and-the-envelope/#commentsTue, 02 Aug 2016 19:29:46 +0000http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/?p=3912More ›]]>Maybe it was the heat, or the humidity. Maybe it was the artist–Diane Arbus, and the fact that diane arbus: in the beginningis focused on her eaerly works, with more than two-thirds of the works on view never before shown.

Whatever the reason, the Met Breuer* was packed when I visited several days ago, on a Sunday afternoon. To all those reasons above, add another one for me: I wanted to see the exhibition design, which is unusual if not unique. It’s the work of Brian Butterfield, a Senior Exhibition Designer at the Met since 2014. Seems to me that he was a very good hire. He also designed Kongo: Power and Majesty, also a beautiful installation.

The Arbus show is a forest of free-standing pillars, each one mounted with one photograph on each side (see photos). This eliminates the all-over-gray, this-looks-boring effect of an exhibition of small, black-amd-white photos, which these are. People can wander through, stopping where they like–there’s no particular preferred order. There’s no beginning, middle, end. I liked it.

I liked it for another reason, too: As museums attempt to draw new audiences, some have changed the context of art in a way that takes away, instead of enhances, the art. This design doesn’t do that. You know what you are there to see, to focus on. Some art folks I know have asked me why I and other critics remark on “the envelope,” when it’s what’s inside that counts. But the envelope is not neutral. It creates an atmosphere, needless to say. It should never distract, and the very successful, to me, Arbus design doesn’t.

It was interesting to note two other things: the room set aside for perusing the Arbus catalogue was completely full. Also, Unfinished, the inaugural special exhibition that has not fared well with critics or the public, wasn’t empty, but wasn’t quite a full as Arbus either. (For me, any opportunity to see that van Eyck, Leonardo, some Turners, Rembrandts, etc. so close at hand is a big bonus.)

I was reminded of this issue in another artistic discipline, when I attended “The Illuminated Heart” at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival. The concert showcased wonderful singers performing Mozart arias, one after another, on stage, with no set changes. The “envelope” here was designed by British director Netia Jones–and brilliantly. She used video projections (all simple and many gorgeous) to enhance the music, never distracting from it (a rendering, above). They were humorous at times, and always appropriate.

Both pieces offer a lesson, an example, to other museums and other arts organizations.